The World Within War: America's Combat Experience With World War II

A look into the personal lives of America's World War II soldiers weaves together letters, diaries, and interviews that capture their experiences on the battlefield and their relationships with one another. 20,000 first printing.

An academic's largely successful and consistently absorbing effort to convey the varied experience of American fighting men during WW II. Drawing on a host of sources, Linderman (Embattled Courage, 1987) creates a vivid mosaic depicting how US soldiers and marines (albeit not airmen or sailors) dealt with the hard roles they played in bloody campaigns in arenas ranging from Guadalcanal, North Africa, and the Rhineland through Iwo Jima. Observing that most if not all American troops had little sense of personal mortality before enduring their baptism of fire, the author (History/Univ. of Michigan) documents how they adjusted to the grim realities and unrelenting shocks of battle. He goes on to show that rules of a sort governed engagements with German foes; in the Pacific theater, by contrast, both US and Japanese forces waged what another historian, John Dower, has called a ``war without mercy.'' Covered as well are the tacit attractions of combat, the widespread disaffection of American enlisted men with their caste- conscious officers, fierce loyalties to comrades in arms, the average GI's reaction to USO performers and the Red Cross, and the editing of casualty reports, as well as the high cost of rugged individualism among American POWs, the adverse impact on morale caused by news of home-front profiteering, and the emotions of those whose only ticket off the line was a fatal or million-dollar wound. Among the notables (literary and otherwise) whose eyewitness testimony informs Linderman's tellingly detailed overview are Art Buchwald, John Ciardi, Orval Faubus, Tom Lea, William Manchester, Bill Mauldin, Audie Murphy, Ernie Pyle, and Eric Sevareid. A fine contribution to WW II scholarship, one that atypically offers human-scale perspectives on those at the sharp end of the bayonet in a horrific global conflict. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Many works seek to explain why soldiers fight as they do, but this one stands out. Historian Linderman explores the social and psychological forces working on America's citizen-soldiers when they found themselves thrown into vast conflicts beyond their expectations. His Embattled Courage (Free Pr., 1989) has become a classic study of the factors that motivated America's Civil War armies. In the present study, Linderman blends the letters and memories of some 500 American mud soldiers?combat infantrymen and Marines?sent against a highly trained enemy in a highly mechanized war. Few real surprises emerge, but the material as a whole is impressive and useful, and the chapters on the differences between fighting the Germans and the Japanese are well worth the price. This book is more penetrating than Geoffrey Perret's There's a War To Be Won (LJ 9/1/91) and makes a nice companion to Michael Doubler's Closing with the Enemy (LJ 11/15/94).?Raymond L. Puffer, U.S. Air Force History Prog., Edwards AFB, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.